A Movement of Darkness on Darkness
by LadyMoriel
Summary: It's the Battle of Hogwarts, and Tonks might be dead, or she might be alive, or she might be both at once. RT. DH spoilers, AU, hints of an unwritten crossover--with Doctor Who, if you'll believe that. Rated for violence.


**Title:** A Movement of Darkness on Darkness  
**Author:** **LadyMoriel**  
**Format & Word Count:** Ficlet, 790 words  
**Rating:** Eh...PG-13 for a little language and violence, but I rate very conservatively  
**rtchallenge**** prompt (March 2008 ficathon):** 2, falling girl; 10, "awake"  
**Warning:** DH spoilers; AU (bet you can guess how); hints of an unwritten crossover, in the same general series as Too Close to the Moon, that allows the...AUness; egregious Eliot-quoting, mostly from "East Coker"; pretentious playing around with punctuation and the lack thereof.  
**Summary:** It's the Battle of Hogwarts, and Tonks might be dead, or she might be alive, or she might be both at once.  
**Author's Note:** I don't exactly know where this came from, since my personal canon on the end of DH hasn't been entirely ironed out yet, except that it involves Adventures in Time and Space with Teddy and the Tenth Doctor (crossover, like I said), and this--I don't even know, really. It's just a kind of snapshot. Also, I fail at titles, which is why I just stole it wholesale from Eliot after I couldn't think of something better.

* * *

**i.**

There is an instant of pain, of fire and red miasma, something burning through her like a shock, and then it's dark and she's falling.

She thinks she still hears screaming, and maybe that it's her own voice, and maybe she's only screaming in her head because there's nothing here, no sound, no light, no air rushing past her ears, she's just falling falling falling and it doesn't stop never stops black dizzy spinning

_(the vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant)_

She's dissolving.

_oh god remus teddy what have i done_

Everything _shifts_, the black not-air ripples around her, convulses, red slews across her not-vision and lights explode behind her eyes (she thinks; she doesn't know if she's got eyes anymore) and the earth turns beneath her and the universe burns around her and she would keep on dissolving except she isn't falling anymore and everything's gone grey and there's nothing, nothing nothing nothing at all.

**ii.**

_Remus, where's Remus?_

_(Where am I?)_

She aches, everywhere. She thinks about this for what seems a very long time until her mind grinds to a painfully slow conclusion: this can't be hell, because it would hurt a lot more, and it can't be heaven, because then it shouldn't hurt at all. And if it's somewhere else—well, even in some kind of limbo she shouldn't feel like she's thirsty enough to drink the entire Black Lake.

Her brain churns through this information and reaches another conclusion that makes her head hurt: she must, impossibly, be alive.

(She can't be alive. She's been knocked out before and this was _different_.)

Her eyes won't open, but she can feel the cool solidity of a stone floor beneath her, her wand an uncomfortable bump under her spine where she fell on it, can hear voices screaming around her, curses shattering wood and stone, and then things go grey and whirling and silent again for a very long time.

_remus teddy god please_

(She thinks, when she is capable of a little thought, that she should wonder more about Voldemort, and then that she should feel guilty for not giving a damn about the evil snake bastard. But she doesn't, all she can think is that Remus is the last of the Marauders and if fate's anything like usual then he _can't _survive, but he _has_ to, somebody has to remember; and the Blacks don't ever let anyone go not ever

There's something about Bella and Dolohov she should remember.)

_(wait without thought, for you are not yet ready for thought)_

At one point the grey and dark shred away, splinters of light and sound reaching her like knives slashing through a veil, and she is quite certain that she manages to roll to her feet and hex a Death Eater bearing down on Ginny, that she sends a fallen piece of masonry flying and it smashes into the back of Dolohov's neck, toppling him. Remus catches her gaze from across the Hall, bloodied but upright, eyes burning.

She thinks he fires a curse over her head before the confusion of things tears them away—she doesn't see who he hits and knows it's Bella, finds herself sorry it wasn't green light—and hears an odd _whoosh_ not far away that is and is not familiar, and sees blood glisten on the stones. Bastards. _Bastards_. They're just children. Who attacks children?

(_We're at war, Dora_.)

So she keeps fighting, rage pumping through her as she flings spells back and forth. She is also, she is quite certain, still lying on the cold floor somewhere, somewhere else, somewhere else where she hasn't entirely figured out whether she's died or not. She would puzzle this out but then the somewhere else reasserts itself and things fall apart and fade away again, and it's all black spinning falling falling dizzy so dark

_o dark dark dark, they all go into the dark_

The world grows solid again. An exhausted quiet has fallen. She thinks maybe they've won and doesn't know. (The dead never win.)

_no please not remus not teddy not harry not—_

This is the way the world ends—not with a bang—

_No. Dear God. No._

She stretches out her fingers, because it's all she can do, and finds a hand inches from hers, a hand she knows with the first brush of skin on skin—the scars, the roughness, the quill-bump on one finger, the palm bent just so—and curls her hand into it. The hand tightens around hers.

_(so the darkness shall be the light)_

Then she's alive, and so is he, and she isn't falling anymore, and somehow—no matter how much it hurts, the slow crawl back to normality—everything's going to be something like all right.

_(…and the stillness the dancing)_


End file.
